In reply to Fear of heights: Afraid of losing control and jump, posted by Lamdage22 on January 5, 2018, at 11:21:18

If you've never been really suicidal, then it is a kind of OCD anxiety. I used to fear driving on major high-speed roads because I was afraid I'd drive into an embankment, but then I had once driven off a mountain road trying to commit suicide. Miraculously, I survived.

In reply to Re: Fear of heights: Afraid of losing control and jump, posted by baseball55 on January 5, 2018, at 18:28:14

How do you define really suicidal? I have not had any attemps.

> If you've never been really suicidal, then it is a kind of OCD anxiety. I used to fear driving on major high-speed roads because I was afraid I'd drive into an embankment, but then I had once driven off a mountain road trying to commit suicide. Miraculously, I survived.

In reply to Re: Fear of heights: Afraid of losing control and jump, posted by Lamdage22 on January 7, 2018, at 7:56:57

> How do you define really suicidal? I have not had any attemps. > > > If you've never been really suicidal, then it is a kind of OCD anxiety. I used to fear driving on major high-speed roads because I was afraid I'd drive into an embankment, but then I had once driven off a mountain road trying to commit suicide. Miraculously, I survived. > I guess I'd sort of respond by saying that if you don't know what it feels like, you probably haven't felt it. Really suicidal, for me, meant thinking about suicide all the time (not just - I wish I were dead - but, I need to kill myself), feeling complete despair and hopelessness that the feeling will never end, planning to commit suicide, getting the means to do so (in my case, opiates to overdose once, other methods, researching methods on line (yes, such sites exist)), and making outright attempts. But the body is hard to kill and, once an attempt has begun, the survival instinct kicks in and says pull back.

This is why gun-owners are most likely to carry out "successful" suicides - no turning back (like when I took an overdose of oxycodone, then called 911), no element of chance (like when I drove over the side of a mountain.

Today, thanks to DBT and meds, I find I am much more able to control these urges. I recently had a period of several weeks, however, when they came back. What helped me hold on was that I now have a pair of cats from the same litter who have never been apart. If I had only one, I might just say, f**k it - somebody will take it. But with two, I really don't want them to be separated, which would almost certainly happen if I were to die.